Posts Tagged ‘fight’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday departed for the US, for a meeting with President Obama and a speech before the General Assembly. As he was leaving, Netanyahu said, “We are in the midst of a very important diplomatic week for the State of Israel. I am leaving now for the United States. There I will first meet with President Obama and I will thank him for the great and important security assistance to the State of Israel over the coming decade. I will then address the United Nations General Assembly. I will present Israel’s case, Israel’s truth, Israel’s justice and also Israel’s heroism – the heroism of our soldiers, our police officers and our citizens, who are waging an uncompromising struggle against brutal terrorism.”

“I expect from the international community a uniform standard in the war on terrorism,” Netanyahu insisted. “Today the entire international community says that there is a need to wage a determined and uncompromising fight against terrorism. And indeed, they must also support the determined and uncompromising fight against terrorism, and this moral clarity is necessary to both fight against – and defeat – terrorism.”

Since the beginning, the Jewish People have been fighting for freedom. As evil regimes and power-hungry dictators try to rise up, feeling themselves ‘superior’ to others and enslaving them under their empires, the Jewish People stand up and say “No!” to tyranny. Until this day, power-hungry regimes try to kill the Jewish People and the light to the world they carry. Guest, Aaron Braunstein from the Jewish Covenant Alliance, talks to Tamar about how Israel must continue to hold the torch of freedom, in order to prevent oppressive regimes like Iran, from taking over and spreading their evil empire.

Late Wednesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement regarding the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the US, saying: “In a short while, in Washington DC, a historic agreement will be signed between the United States and Israel. This agreement will ensure an unprecedented level of security assistance to Israel over the coming decade. This is the largest military assistance package that the United States has ever given to any country.”

A few lines down, Netanyahu wrote: “I would like to thank President Obama and his administration for this historic agreement,” and, “I also thank our many, many friends in the American Congress and among the American people for their great support, which crosses party lines and embraces the length and breadth of the United States.”

There, in the cross-section between the President and Congress, is where the drama over the US aid package to Israel will be taking place in the coming months. It also explains why the PM has embraced a deal that is, clearly, a step back in terms of Israel’s ambitions for US military aid.

According to Ha’aretz, citing senior defense ministry officials, as recently as last July US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and then Defense Minster Moshe Ya’alon have reached an agreement in principle on a $45 billion aid package over ten years. Why is Israel now willing to settle for $7 billion less? Ha’aretz, typically, blames the cut on Netanyahu’s refusal to toe the line on the Iran nuclear deal, and his insolent battle against the President in Congress over it. But that doesn’t explain why Sec. Carter was offering the larger amount months after Netanyahu’s March 3, 2015 speech in Congress.

Like all deals, the $38 billion MOU must still be confirmed in the Senate, first by the Appropriations Committee and then by the full Senate. One key member of the committee is Senator Lindsey Graham (R – SC), who earlier this week told the Washington Post: “The Israeli prime minister told me the administration is refusing to sign the MOU until I agree to change my appropriation markup back to $3.1 billion. I said, ‘Tell the administration to go [expletive] themselves.’”

The 10-year aid package reaching its conclusion in 2017 was set at “only” $31 billion, but, in addition, Congress has been awarding Israel additional funds: $729 million in 2014 to help with the acquisition gaps caused by the Gaza War, as well as to help the development of the Iron Dome system. In 2015 Congress gave Israel $620 million in addition to the aid package, and this year the estimates are around $600 million. So that the aid Israel currently receives from the US is pretty close to the MOU’s $38 Billion. Israel will only benefit from an additional $100 million annually. For a country boasting a $300 billion annual GDP, this is the definition of chump change.

Why, then, did Netanyahu agree to an MOU that compels Israel to pay back whatever amount Congress adds in military aid, which would include an attempt by, say, Senator Lindsey Graham, to tack on an extra $7 billion to the proposed package?

“I’m offended that the administration would try to take over the appropriations process. If they don’t like what I’m doing, they can veto the bill,” Graham told the Post. “We can’t have the executive branch dictating what the legislative branch will do for a decade based on an agreement we are not a party to.”

The MOU awards the Israeli missile defense development effort $500 million per year, more than the $487 million Congress gave it in 2016, but less than the Senate appropriations bill for 2017, which gives Israel $600 million. By the way, Obama asked for only $145.8 million in the budget. So, should the MOU go through the Senate, Israel would lose $600 million right off the bat. And Israel signed a letter, as part of the MOU, that any amount tacked on to the aid package in later years, Israel would be obligated to give back.

A White House official said this is better for Israel, since “the fact that under our offer Israel can count on the administration’s commitment to provide a substantial level of missiledefense assistance for a 10-year period is substantively different from the missile- defense support it has received in previous years.” There’s some truth to it — rather than go lobbying every year for that money, Israel is guaranteed a moderately lower sum, it’s already in the bank.

“You know the White House pressured them into writing that letter,” Graham said. “It is a level of antagonism against Israel that I can’t understand.”

Graham is irate because the MOU was a White House attempt to neutralize the Republican Congress’s ability to forge an independent relationship with the Jewish State. They can continue to invite Bibi to talk to them against the next president, if they so wish, but they can’t give him a penny. Vindictive? Probably. But also understandable. This President spent much of his two terms in office fighting Congress over foreign policy. He’d like to leave his successor a cleaner slate, at least when it comes to dealing with Israel.

The MOU is also better for the Pentagon, which, together with the White House, can keep all the money going to Israel inside one, manageable package. Should the need arise for additional funds, Israel would have to go to the President, not Congress, and when Israel asks for something, Israel also has to give something. Also, in six years, according to the MOU, Israel will lose the right to spend any of the aid package on its own military industrial complex — all the money must stay in the US. Of course, by then Israeli manufacturers would follow Elbit and Rafael and forge partnerships with US corporations, but the jobs in Israel would be lost.

“I’m not pleased with a provision in the MOU which prohibits Israel from using American defense assistance on Israeli defense suppliers,” Senator Graham wrote on his website. “Israel’s homegrown defense technology is some of the best in the world.” He added, “Under our old agreement Israel was allowed to develop cutting-edge military technology and was required to share this technology with the United States. I’m proud to say that many of these advancements helped protect the lives of American service members in uniform. I do not believe this new provision will serve the interests of the United States or Israel. I do fear it will be Americans wearing the uniform of our nation who will pay the price for this short-sighted change in policy.”

So, it’s obvious why the MOU represents a good deal for the Administration. But why was Netanyahu “duped” into signing the MOU? There are two possible explanations, and they both have to do with the coming lame duck session of Congress. Since last summer, there have been persistent rumors in Jerusalem and Washington that, once the November 8 election is over, the Obama Administration would spend its last breath on squeezing a 2-state deal out of Israel. To do that, the rumors went, Obama would join the majority in the UN Security Council to pass resolutions that push Israel against the wall. It would be ugly, it would be painful, there would be no support for the move from either the Democrats nor the Republicans, but it won’t matter. It would be a move that can’t be stopped by Congress, and Israel would, at last, bow to the pressure.

Did Netanyahu sign the MOU in return for an Obama promise to leave him alone between Nov. 9 and January 17? Perhaps. Of course, the above nightmare scenario is not something we would expect from any US president, except for the fact that President Obama has been so capricious and unpredictable about his bizarre “Arab Spring” campaign, that if anyone would dream up something like that it would be him.

The other point has to do with the conversation Netanyahu had with Senator Graham earlier this week, in which, we understand, Graham did most of the talking, and only part of it was taken up by expletives. The Senator from South Carolina, with Bibi’s blessing, can bury the MOU. He has at his disposal several parliamentary means of delaying it until after the start of the new year. It won’t be simple, and there are members on the Democratic side of the Appropriations Committee who are decidedly not friendly to Israel (Senator Patrick Leahy, Dem – Vt comes to mind) who would attack Graham viciously. But if Graham can drag this deal long enough, he could get it tossed and rewritten by the next Administration.

David Nesenoff travels the world talking about his May 27, 2010 encounter at the White House with the late Helen Thomas, longtime star reporter and dean of the White House press corps.

Invited by Brooklyn’s Chabad of Sea-Gate, Nesenoff spoke last month at Kneses Israel (the Big Shul). Rabbis Chaim Brikman, Leiby Brikman, Pinny Marozov, and Heshy Ceitlin thought it important for their fellow Jews to know the backstory of Nesenoff’s exchange with Thomas, especially with anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel on the rise in so many parts of the world.

At the heart of the story are Nesenoff, his then-teenage son Adam, and Adam’s friend Daniel Landau, who were attending a Jewish Heritage Month celebration on the White House lawn.

Nesenoff’s idea was to tape people’s responses to the question “What do you think about Israel?” He planned to publish the responses on his RabbiLive.com website. Suddenly, Nesenoff spotted Thomas walking toward them.

“Any comments on Israel?” Nesenoff asked her.

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” said Thomas, a daughter of Lebanese immigrants.

Nesenoff reacted like he’d been stun-gunned to the core of his being. “Oooh!” he said. “Any better comments?”

Weirdly laughing, Thomas admonished Nesenoff: “Remember, these people [the Palestinians] are occupied and it’s their land. It’s not Germany. It’s not Poland.”

Though not a seasoned journalist, Nesenoff knew enough to keep it going and ask the logical follow-up: “So where should they go? What should they do?”

Thomas: They should go home.

Nesenoff: Where’s home?

Thomas: Poland. Germany.

Nesenoff repeated it back, making sure he’d heard what he thought he’d heard: “So the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany.”

“And America – and everywhere else,” added Thomas, who then asked rhetorically, “Why push people out who live there for centuries?”

To which Nesenoff asked her, “Are you familiar with the history of that region and what took place there?”

Thomas replied: “Very much! I’m of Arab background.”

The video of that conversation was posted online and quickly went viral, with media reps and reporters condemning Thomas, while contacting Nesenoff with interview requests.

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush, called Nesenoff and told him it was important to find a “message” to go with the story.

But what, Nesenoff wondered, was the right message? His son asked him, “You can speak to anyone in the world – who do you want me to call?”

Nesenoff’s first choice, Elie Wiesel, said he’d read about Nesenoff’s habit of davening with Chabad. Find out what the Rebbe would have said about putting a message to the story, Wiesel suggested.

Nesenoff contacted Chabad Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, who had known the Rebbe well.

What the Rebbe would have advised, said Shemtov, was something like this: “We are not the friends of Israel; we are the Children of Israel. Sometimes we are away for a little while in galus or sometimes we are away for a few years in Auschwitz. But we are still the Children of Israel. Israel and the Children of Israel are one – forever.”

Nesenoff repeated the Children of Israel message on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program a couple of weeks after his encounter with Thomas.

Yale University professor Charles Asher Small was near a TV when the CNN show aired. Small asked Nesenoff to be the keynote speaker at Yale’s inaugural 2010 Symposium on Global Anti-Semitism, which Small was chairing later that summer.

Meanwhile, criticism of Thomas’s remarks, which had come fast and furious from the moment Nesenoff put the video online, continued unabated, even after Thomas apologized a week after the encounter and retired a few days later.

President Obama condemned Thomas’s comments, calling them “offensive” and “out of line.” Lanny Davis, special counsel to former president Bill Clinton, said Thomas “showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot.” Ari Fleischer called for Thomas to be fired, adding, “If this isn’t bigotry, what is? What she said is as bad as someone saying all blacks should leave America and go back to Africa.”

Poster advertising Nesenoff’s appearance in Sea Gate last month.

Thomas’s agency, Nine Speakers, Inc., dropped her as a client. Craig Crawford, who had co-authored Thomas’s book Listen up, Mr. President, said he would “no longer be working with Helen on our book projects.” Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, canceled the commencement speech Thomas was scheduled to deliver at the school.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, over which she had once presided, called her remarks “indefensible” and the plaque engraved with her name was removed from her front row seat in the White House briefing room. In January 2011, the Society of Professional Journalists voted to do away with the Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her alma mater, Wayne State University, took back the tolerance award it had bestowed on her.

There were plenty of people who still loved Thomas, though – some perhaps more than before – and Nesenoff (who would go on to receive the National Jewish Hero Award from the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute) was deluged with hate mail, even death threats, and required police protection.

Her fans included consumer advocate Ralph Nader, television personalities Joy Behar and Rosie O’Donnell, and political commentator Keith Olbermann, who called Nesenoff’s video a totally unfair “ambush” interview.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) gave Thomas a lifetime achievement award in October 2010. And, a bit belatedly, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s General Mission to the U.S. gave Thomas an award in April 2012 in honor of her “long career in the field of journalism, during which she defended the Palestinian position every step of the way.” PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi presented the honor to Thomas on behalf of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Nearly a year after her confrontation with Nesenoff, Thomas admitted her apology was disingenuous, telling writer David Hochman that she really didn’t regret her anti-Jewish, anti-Israel statements. In the course of that interview, published in the April 2011 issue of Playboy, she unabashedly proclaimed her belief in an “Elders of Zion”-type Jewish conspiracy that entailed “total control” over the White House, Congress, and U.S. financial markets.

“Everybody is in the pocket of the Israeli lobbies, which are funded by wealthy supporters, including those from Hollywood,” Thomas told Hochman.

An incredulous Hochman asked her whether she really believed “there’s a secret Jewish conspiracy at work in this country.” To which Thomas replied: “Not a secret. It’s very open. What do you mean secret?”

And she revealed to Hochman that shortly after she’d made the comments that would end her career, a sympathetic Jimmy Carter called to offer his support. “He talked about the Israelis in the Middle East, the violations. It was very nice of him to call, but I don’t want to get him into trouble,” confided Thomas.

Having aired her true feelings to Hochman, Thomas doubled down on her defiant and unapologetic attitude, telling an Ohio radio station a few months later that she realized soon after talking to Nesenoff that she would be fired because “I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive.”

She added that she issued an apology because people were upset but she still “had the same feelings about Israel’s aggression and brutality.”

Helen Thomas died on July 20, 2013, at the age of 92.

As for Nesenoff, the lesson he took away from his fateful encounter with Thomas is simple and straightforward.

“Each time I tell my story,” he says, “I tell my audiences the way to fight anti-Jewish is by doing Jewish. I know this is what the Rebbe would have wanted me to say.

American tax laws originally enacted to combat money laundering and terrorism adversely affect the millions of American citizens living abroad.

Colleen Graffy, a former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Professor of International Law at Pepperdine University, explains why FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) restrictions are unfair to law-abiding U.S. expats. Did FATCA lower the value of U.S. citizenship?

Whether FATCA applies to you or not, you need to prepare for retirement. Consider whether dividend-paying stocks are appropriate for retirement savings. Find out more, and also how to download a free copy of The Retirement Planning Book, written by Douglas Goldstein CFP®, by listening to today’s show.

The Goldstein On Gelt Show is a financial podcast. Click on the player below to listen. For show notes and contact details of the guest, go to www.GoldsteinOnGelt.com

With the sale of one of the world’s major repositories of news photographs recently, it has suddenly gotten a lot harder (we discovered just today) to locate many archived images of news events from the recent past.

This is relevant to us. We are passionate about wanting people to be aware of some of the less-well-publicized aspects of terrorism and what it means when it’s done to you.

Three news photos were published in October 2011 that recorded an event connected indirectly to our lives but basically unknown to almost anyone else.

The chief engineer of our daughter’s murder, sentenced a few years before to sixteen terms of life imprisonment, was set free by Israel in October 2011. A day later, she arrived in another country where most of her family had lived since before she was born (and still lives) and where she herself was born. There she was greeted with pomp, ceremony and emotion at an official reception in the Family Court of that country, located in its capital city.

People who know the Middle East and the ins and outs of terrorism probably don’t know any of this, and perhaps don’t care. The photos recording the reception in the court building may be the only evidence that it happened. And with the sale to a Chinese firm of the photo archive that housed them, that evidence is now hard to find.

Before we go into the background, we have just posted those pictures at the foot of this article. We have mentioned them numerous times in this blog. We want them to be seen. People need to appreciate the painful and damaging double-talk that is part of the global conversation about terrorism.

To the backstory:

Our daughter Malki, aged just 15, was murdered in a horrifyingly effective terrorist attack done by Hamas on a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem on August 9, 2001. The attack’s chief engineer was a woman of 21. Arrested and then convicted, an Israeli court sentenced her to spend several lifetimes behind bars. But she boasted openly of the killings, admitting everything, gloating at the death toll, and asserting that she would soon be free.

Her words were prophetic. Today she lives a charmed life of total freedom in a city located no more than 90 minutes drive from us, in a country which has relatively good diplomatic relations with the United States and virtually all of Europe. It has relations, not so warm but nonetheless proper and ongoing, with Israel.

That country is Jordan.

Jordan says it is opposed to terrorism and to terrorists. As we noted here just three months ago, the State Department of the United States agrees – vigorously. In its annual survey of the war against terror, State singles out Jordan for unique and special praise. The most recent “Country Reports on Terrorism” annual survey, published in Washington in June 2015, says this of the Hashemite Kingdom:

Jordan remained a key ally and a model partner in combating terrorism and extremist ideology… Jordan demonstrated regional leadership in the fight against ISIL… and participated fully on the diplomatic, political, financial, and military fronts… Jordanian prisons have a religiously based de-radicalization program that seeks to re-engage violent extremist inmates into the non-violent mainstream of their faith.

Jordan hanged a female terrorist that week. and we wrote this at the time:

Regular readers of this blog know about another Jordanian female, an ex-prisoner, also a terrorist, with a different fate: Ahlam al-Tamimi. Unlike Mrs al-Rishawi who was hanged today, Mrs al-Tamimi is a Jordanian, born, bred, educated and (following an 11 year-period spent outside Jordan) now living with her husband/cousin, in Jordan.
Tamimi has never spent time in any Jordanian prison, and never will. Quite the opposite: she was honored with a reception in Jordan’s Family Court in October 2011 when she returned home… She has her own weekly television program… recorded in Jordan by her friends and employers in the Hamas terror organization and beamed throughout the world on the Al-Quds TV Network. And she is free to travel throughout the Arab world which it seems she does often, giving lectures and being an honoured guest…
Tamimi has over and again confessed [via this video interview, among numerous other instances] freely, proudly and happily to the massacre at Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeriain 2001 for the engineering of which she was convicted. She was sentenced to 16 life terms in prison with a judicial recommendation that she live the rest of her life behind bars with no possibility of a commutation of sentence.That is not how it worked out. She was one of 1,027 terrorists set free in the extortion-driven 2011 Gilad Shalit Israel/Hamas transaction, despite a campaign we personally waged for years. We urged our government to stand firm, to not give in, to keep this particular sociopath behind bars so that justice could be done… Today she is a globally-influential instigator of jihadist terror – an icon of hatred.
What Jordan – a sovereign state at least half of whose population defines itself as Palestinian Arab, and ruled by a dynastic family from Saudi Arabia – ought to do with its terrorists is emphatically not our concern. Jordan’s laws that purportedly outlaw terrorism… don’t get the critical attention in the West that they richly deserve.

Frankly there’s a lot about Jordan that doesn’t get scrutinized and should.

She is a genuine pan-Arab celebrity. The first female to join the ranks of Hamas terrorists, and an eloquent figure who advocates energetically from Jordan for more violence, more murder and more jihad – all of it directed at Jewish and Israeli targets. Inciting via television and a range of social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) and well-publicized personal appearances, she is a widely-recognized, very public face of the savage Islamist bigotry of Hamas.

Truly, people ought to know more about her.

A person wanting to understand how the war against the jihadists is going might now be asking these questions:

So which other key ally and model partner of the United States honors its terrorists via fancy receptions in its official courts?

What real messages are those partners and allies conveying to their people when they do it?

And why can’t a state (Jordan) that is part of the coalition against the jihadists stop the torrent of bigotry, barbarism and calls to murder that their inaction empowers this woman to issue forth from the heart of their capital city?

Why are the parents of a teenage girl murdered by a fanatical agent of jihad the only voices being heard exposing and decrying this appalling state of affairs?

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi) is in the advanced stages of preparing a government bill that would compel Internet providers to reveal which users are downloading pirated content, The Marker reported Wednesday. The content providers would then be able to sue home users for copyright infringement.

11 major Israeli content providers who formed the organization Zira (Hebrew acronym for Internet copyrights) have been complaining that existing laws are limiting their ability to stop distribution of pirated content, because today they can only effectively bring to justice providers who operate inside Israel, while enormous distribution resources are available online but off-shore.

Current Israeli law does recognize certain private downloads as copyright infringements, but to date Internet providers are not obligated to reveal information about their customers. According to The Marker, content providers in the US and in several other countries have been allowed by new legislation to force Internet providers to turn in clients who download illegally, and have sued them successfully.

In 2011 the Knesset passed in a first reading a law that combined compelling Internet providers to expose clients who download illegally as well as clients who are accused of spreading libel online. But the bill did not survive the committee deliberations and was put on hold.

Shaked would like the new version to focus on illegal downloads alone, which would mean that even if a user is downloading pirated content from abroad, they can be sued over it in Israel.

Attorney Jonathan Klinger is a fierce opponent of the proposed legislation. “This is a significant and severe violation of the privacy of citizens, as Internet providers would be demanded to expose private information about users,” he told The Marker. He cited similar litigated cases in the US, where, he said, content providers have had to spend as much as $1,000 on litigation to collect $1. “They’ve invested in expensive technologies to prevent infringement but to no avail. In Germany there’s a little more enforcement, but there, too, you don’t really see lawsuits, it’s more like sanctions by the Internet providers.”

Klinger believes the solution is in new models of distribution. The problem is that content providers have yet to change their archaic business model, which is why they require laws to protect them. He noted that wherevr content providers have used creative business models that came from an understanding of the product and the end users, there is no piracy.

“Unauthorized downloads happen when the content copyright holders won’t allow people to enjoy it. They should look for new, creative models.”